Posted by David on February 28, 2008, 1:49 pm, in reply to "Re: There are reasons to vote Obama -- just not good ones"
86.47.143.98
At one time, I'm told, Myers was a serious journalist when covering the troubles, now he appears to be completely reliant on racist and sexist diatribe (the kind so absurd that they must be the result of some sort of 'lapsed liberalism'). It seems unlikely he believes half of what he writes.
Myers is also an ardent critic of anything remotely nationalist, and this is an amusing anecdote on the pitfalls of that approach...
Pinning down Kevin Myers
[Brian P ] Murphy [Irish historian] outlined how [Official British] propaganda and media manipulation was organized and how this propaganda ‘spin’ had a shelf life that infected modern day accounts. Kevin Myers in The Irish Times republished one concoction of [Basil] Clarke’s [Head of British Propaganda in Ireland circa 1920] that attempted to discredit hunger striker Terence MacSwiney. MacSwiney was accused of plotting the assassination of the Bishop of Cork. Uniquely, Myers later apologized for recirculation of this defamatory lie.
However, it was only at the book launch that we found out how and why Myers came to apologise.
MacSwiney’s grandson, spoke during the Q&A session afterwards about how getting the apology published was “not easy”. He accompanied his mother, Maura MacSwiney Brugha, “as her assistant” in pursuing Myers into The Irish Times building and in pinning Myers to a wall, in order to enable Myers to listen to his mother’s account of how he got it totally wrong. Myers was later to admit publicly that he had been “duped” by, “the insidious concoctions of the black propagandist,” Basil Clarke.
However, subsequently, Clarke’s other “insidious concoctions” found in the post-apologetic Myers a willing receptacle for publication of further propaganda.
Myers did not detect Clarke at work in the British account of the Kilmichael ambush. In The IRA and its Enemies Peter Hart thanked Myers for his help. Myers returned the compliment by praising the 1998 revisionist account as a “masterpiece”. Myers wrote in his Irishman’s diary how Tom Barry and the IRA allegedly “systematically slaughtered disarmed RIC Auxiliaries after they had surrendered”. This account, following Peter Hart, is from the Basil Clarke school of media manipulation and, as Clarke puts it, “verisimilitude” or the appearance of truth.
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/75117
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